VMWare Workstation 6.5 Beta on Ubuntu Linux 64-bit

August 22, 2008 by Leave a Comment

I’m trying out VMWare Workstation 6.5 beta. I’m testing the Unity feature with a Windows guest on Linux 64-bit. I like the idea: it needs polish, but I’m looking forward to it smoothing out like the other features we’ve accepted as stable that usually get introduced in Workstation versions initially.

Filed Under: Original Documents, Tools, VMware Tagged With: , , , ,

Interview with Alex Raitz: Splunk for Virtualization Monitoring

August 19, 2008 by Leave a Comment

Check out our latest interview with Alex Raitz from Splunk.  Alex and I worked together a few years ago and it was really nice to catch up with him and see how our paths are crossing again.

If you are not familiar with Splunk, it can be described as the IT search engine. It can help you find all kinds of information on any platform and system that generates log files. It’s really flexible and can install on Linux, Windows, UNIX, Solaris, Mac and FreeBSD. If that’s not easy enough, it’s free!

Filed Under: Citrix, Commands, Interviews, Linux, Microsoft, Original Documents, Splunk, Tools Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

vbScript That Reads a List of Servers and Performs an Action

July 21, 2008 by Leave a Comment

Between Windows-centric projects, I usually forget how to get a vbscript to read a text file with a list of servers and perform some action on them. So, I’m posting this one for that functionality mainly. This one happens to look for Network Adapter speeds. The MSDN site is a great resource to see all the Win32 Classes.

This isn’t necessarily pretty and I’m sure there’s better examples, but it gets the job done discovering necessary hardware information for virtualization planning.

Filed Under: Commands, Microsoft, Original Documents, Scripts and Utiliites Tagged With: , ,

Using Sysprep to Customize a 2003 SP2 Template on VirtualCenter 2.5

January 22, 2008 by 2 Comments

It isn’t documented all that well in the VC 2.5 Administration Guide, but it is possible to customize a 2003 SP2 template with minimal effort.

  1. Download and install the 2003 SP2 Sysprep hotfix : KB Article ID 926028. I did this on my VC 2.5 server.
  2. Extract c:\windows\system32\deploy.cab to C:\<ALLUSERSPROFILE>\Application Data\Vmware\VMware VirtualCenter\sysprep\svr2003\
  3. You should now have the option within VirtualCenter to customize a 2003 SP2 template.

This worked for me. I’m going to give it a try in another environment to ensure it wasn’t a fluke.

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